Developing PSS business ecosystems in the digital era

This paper presents two approaches to developing PSS (product-service systems) business ecosystems for manufacturing and service organisations by leveraging digital development. Our research is based on two in-depth, comparative case studies of large multinational corporations: one manufacturing company that takes the servitisation approach and the other a logistics services company taking a productisation approach. The research addresses two principal gaps in extant PSS research. First, most extant PSS research focuses predomi-nantly on servitisation development and overlooks the productisation perspective. We address this gap by considering PSS from both a productisation and servitisation perspective. Second, extant research investigates PSS integration mainly from the 'technical' and 'commercial' perspectives. In contrast, this research adds a 'social' perspective by considering the business-to-authority (B2A) and business-to-public (B2P) relations. The findings also provide business practitioners with preliminary yet meaningful insights into holistic consideration of PSS ecosystem integration from 'technical', 'commercial' and 'social' perspectives. Moreover, we seek to push the boundaries of PSS ecosystem research and promote interdisciplinary research across fields, including busi-ness strategy, industrial marketing, social marketing, public policy and supply chain management.